Performance indicators have, of course, been with us for decades. Before the 1980s, they took the form of detailed statistics on finance and enrolment in the nation's universities. Somewhere in government (usually this meant the provincial government), someone read "the numbers," and public funding was eventually released.

After the early 1980s, PIs acquired unprecedented influence in government decision making. The new PIs "movement" started in the community colleges in British Columbia and Alberta, which found themselves under the increasingly insistent scrutiny of chartered accountants and government bureaucrats. From the colleges, the movement spread quickly to universities and into the schools. Meanwhile, PIs gained enough popularity that the annual Maclean's survey of Canadian universities has become a bestseller.

CAUT realized in the mid-1990s that PIs posed a threat to university autonomy -- but also might be an opportunity.

The threat was clear enough. Under a system of PIs, universities were to shape their curricula and their teaching to ensure maximum student employability, and to increase student satisfaction levels. Meanwhile, university funding was rapidly declining, and PIs gave governments a convenient way of deciding which institutions and which programs they would fund.

Our opportunity: to show the public the immediate and negative consequences of increased intervention, by accountants or by government functionaries. We thought we might be able to offer indicators that would not threaten autonomy, that would respect collective agreements (for example, not interfering with promotion and tenure procedures), and that would draw attention to the persistent underfunding of the system.

Unfortunately, since the late 1990s, PIs have gone another step. They've attracted the attention of the private sector, which sees in PIs an easy way to force quick changes in the curriculum and teaching in universities and colleges. PIs have become even more popular in provinces such as Alberta, where significant amounts of funding are decided on the basis of PIs.

Given the latest flood of developments, CAUT may want to review its policy and strategy on PIs. The work of the new HSSFC Advisory Committee on PIs, on which CAUT sits, will inform that review, and give us a leg up as we begin ... again.

Bill Bruneau is past president of CAUT.